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google-cloud-bigtable

BigTable - Can you store boolean values?

Is it possible to store boolean values?

I tried storing a True value in BigTable, and got the error message:

TypeError: True could not be converted to bytes

Looking at the code in GitHub, the function _to_bytes was used, and it throws an error if it cannot be converted to bytes.

Is there a recommended way to store boolean data? Or should I just cast True/False and then remember to convert the values back to Boolean when I retrieve the data?

Solution

  • You cannot store a Boolean type in BigTable using Python.

    This is what the documentation says about the data types that can be stored in BigTable:

    Cloud Bigtable treats all data as raw byte strings for most purposes

    So it seems that the best option you have is, as you said, to cast "True/False" as Strings and convert the data back to Boolean when you get it.